you'd be nice to come home to
by takeitandrun
Summary: One-Shot. Shane Gray is a fallen soldier. Rated T for suggestive themes.


_This is the first time I've ever posted anything in English, so please try not to laugh too much. Thanks._

His tongue felt like lead. His head was rolling side-to-side on top of a stretcher and he barely had time to look up at the desert's clear night sky before he lost consciousness again.

* * *

He hadn't meant to jump in front of a bullet for White, but the man had a wife and two kids back home. What type of soldier would he be if he let three lives get ruined because of a piece of metal?

* * *

He blinked his eyes open and immediately squinted under the bright industrial lights of the ER. He squeezed his eyes shut with even more force when the blinding pain in his lower abdomen came to his notice.

What didn't feel bad was the gentle touch of a hand on his forehead and someone's distant voice telling him something he couldn't make out the words. Still, for some odd reason, he felt a bit more relaxed before everything went black again.

* * *

He was alone when he woke up again. His bed was shoved somewhere at the precarious hospital but his wound didn't hurt so badly anymore. He looked around for the source of the soothing voice he had heard earlier, but no doctors were around this time.

The tiles in the ceiling were mismatched and cracked, and they reminded him of his uncle's kitchen and his father's stew.

* * *

He opened his eyes for the third time in less than twenty hours to find out who was the person he'd heard.

A woman around his age with deep brown eyes and short brown hair was scribbling into his chart when she realized he was awake and moved her sharp gaze to him.

"Mr. Grey, can you hear me?"

"Would you please just call me Shane?" Her face remained expressionless.

"The bullet didn't hit any major organs and we were able to retrieve it without complications. You'll be discharged in two weeks."

Her voice was stony, yes, but there was something about it that caused something to click inside him. It wasn't that he hadn't heard a woman's voice in a while – three women were on his team and he had rescued too many ladies in this job – or that she rescued him from death.

* * *

By midnight, he had learned her name.

Michelle Torres.

* * *

Shane learned she was twenty-nine and was to leave the field in twelve weeks from another doctor, Nate Black. He was a bit younger than him and had curly bouncing hair like a puppy's, but his eyes were rimmed with dark shadows and his black eyes held something of depth, so Shane decided not to make fun of him.

* * *

The man whose bed was next to his passed away during the next night and it was the first time Shane had ever seen something other than blankness shift through Michelle's _– because she had stopped being Doctor Torres somewhere between one and two in the morning –_ eyes.

It flashed past her lids for just a second before it was gone, but Shane knew people well enough to recognize it as grief and a deep sadness that made him itch to comfort her.

And as a man of study, he could easily label it as some sort of neediness that came with the job, but it ran so deep that the decided to let the excuse go.

* * *

His lower hip had been bandaged too, he noticed. He had that cut for a while and he started to worry about it being infected, so was relieved when Michelle patiently answered that no, they had taken care of it.

Shane settled that Michelle was too big of a name for someone so tiny like her – no matter how good she looked in her army pants and white wife-beater – so he came up with Mitchie.

He earned the first of many glares from her.

* * *

It took him another two days to get her to smile.

One day he had just quipped a "how you doin'" and she chuckled and smiled at him. Shane felt something unknot inside him and made him warm with happiness that he could shake off that haunted look to her face.

Fiery hot pain shot up from his lower muscles as Shane tried to push himself into a different position. Nate shot him a disapproving glance and Mitchie didn't even look up from her charts.

He didn't know what hurt most- his body or her indifference.

* * *

Shane learned later that she was anything but indifferent. He pretended to be asleep as she gently eased him back into his previous position, planting a soft kiss to his forehead and an "I know you're awake" against his battered skin.

It was a defense system, he realized in the middle of the week.

They were surrounded by pain and death and she distanced herself from her patients so she wouldn't get attached. He also thought that even when they survived, she also knew it would be only a matter of time before they came back into her care.

Shane hated the mere idea of her detaching herself away from him so he made an effort to touch her more, satisfied as she never pulled away from his light grip on her shirt.

* * *

His last day at the hospital came to a start by their first real conversation.

"Do you have any family, Mitchie?"

She almost growled at the nickname, but replied anyway. "No." she hesitated. "Do you?"

"No," he smiled, shrugging. "But I always thought you had a husband waiting for you."

"Don't forget your medicine, Gray." she said over her shoulder, but he did catch a rosy tint to her cheeks before she left.

* * *

Just before he was released, he walked into a corridor Nate pointed out to him. His uniform was like a burden on him but at the same time freeing.

Mitchie was there, talking to a nurse very calmly in that way of hers.

Shane walked over to her and she was genuinely surprised to see him there. He mumbled a "thank you" that felt like too little and she replied with an "anytime" that begged "_please do not enter this ER again or I'll burst into tears_". He felt like a Disney movie character, but held out his hand and she shook it, her fingertips ghosting over his tanned skin.

Stupidly, sometimes his mind wandered back to that moment, and lingered into the troubled look that crossed her features before he turned to his sandy life.

* * *

He went back home after ten months and got a job at the Bureau. He visited Jason White's family and penned a letter to Nate Black about something he couldn't for the life of him remember, but he never touched the scrap of paper written "_Mitchie_" in his new desk.

Instead, he got himself some friends, like Caitlyn Gellar, a journalist with a quirky sense of humor; Sierra Ackley, a local cop and closet geek; Tess Tyler, Peggy Dufay and Ella Pador, his naïve-but-friendly neighbors.

* * *

Days and weeks went by and Caitlyn got that sly look on her face that screamed "_I don't know if you'll like this, but I will whatever the outcome_" that got him into a keg party two weeks after he moved in, so Shane decided to hide in his office for a few days.

But of course, she wound up on his doorstep with a smirk and a dress shirt.

"Get ready; we're going on a double date."

"Wait, what?"

"Remember that guy I told you about?"

"No," he answered truthfully.

* * *

His eyes almost bulged out of their sockets when he spotted two familiar figures entering the restaurant. Without a word to Caitlyn, Shane got up and nodded at the man before trapping his friend into a fierce hug.

Mitchie sniffed against his shoulder. "I thought you were-"

"I'm he- oh my God _we're_ here."

Nate was somewhere to his right, smirking his eyes off and Caitlyn had her victorious pose but it didn't matter at _all_, because Michelle Torres was in his arms and was as desperate as he was.

* * *

Shane found out she was a Jonas Brothers fangirl when younger and had a thing for May-December TV couples. That she took her coffee with milk and despised tea. That she had thought about sending him a letter thousands and thousands of times before giving up and burying herself in work.

Some days they never even left the bed, him being on top of his paperwork and her having a day off to spend. Shane explored every inch of ivory skin and memorized every little sound she made; evaporated any insecurity she had around him and never missed a chance to just gather her up and pull her close, both half-expecting to wake up back in the middle of the desert.

That feeling of being close to losing each other faded in two months, but it was replaced by a need to see each other every day. Because of that, she decided to move in- but Shane never realized how tangled she was in her life before one of Jason's kids asked him "where is Aunt Mitchie?"

Mitchie had smiled shyly when he told her about it that night. Her hands were in the counter and she was facing him with a blush; Shane wondered how exactly he lived before her.

* * *

They were both very against marriage while growing up, but they were both insanely happy when she said "yes, I will marry you" in a random day at the park.

The warrior in him complained about his complete trust on someone he knew for less than a year. Yet she smiled tearfully and Shane claimed he'd never seen something so beautiful.

It took him six days to realize she had a habit of tracing the broken skin on his hip. Sometimes it hurt during the day; but Mitchie never knew about it. So it was a nice surprise, to wake up next to his _fiancée_ and to have her looking at him with such warmness and trust.


End file.
